BBC releases first trailer for Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light

“…have the axe in your hand.”

The BBC has released the first trailer for Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light and announced that the series will launch on BBC iPlayer and BBC One on Sunday 10 November at 9pm, with new episodes premiering weekly.

Reuniting the creative team from the BAFTA and Golden Globe winning first series, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light is directed by seven-time BAFTA award winner Peter Kosminsky, adapted for television by Academy award nominee Peter Straughan and produced by Colin Callender’s Playground and Company Pictures.

A new picture has also been released featuring Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell and Damian Lewis as King Henry VIII.

The trailer shows Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance) as he navigates the court of King Henry VIII (Damian Lewis), encountering Henry’s new wife, Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips), his daughter Lady Mary (Lilit Lesser), Rafe Sadler (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), Gregory Cromwell (Charlie Rowe), Thomas Wriostheley (Harry Melling), Dorothea (Hannah Khalique-Brown) and Sir Geoffrey Pole (Pip Carter), with flashbacks of Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce).

The series also features Timothy Spall as the Duke of Norfolk, Harriet Walter as Lady Margaret Pole, Alex Jennings as Stephen Gardiner, Tom Mothersdale as Richard Riche, Karim Kadjar as Eustache Chapuys, Maisie Richardson-Sellers as Bess Oughtred, Ellie de Lange as Jenneke and Lydia Leonard as Jane Rochford.

May, 1536. Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, and five of her coterie are dead. As the axe drops, Thomas Cromwell emerges from the bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour.

Cromwell, a man with only his wits to rely on, has no great family to back him, and no private army. Navigating the moral complexities that accompany the exercise of power in this brutal and bloody time, Cromwell is caught between his desire to do what is right and his instinct to survive. But in the wake of Henry VIII having executed his queen, no one is safe.

Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. All of England lies at his feet, ripe for innovation and religious reform. But as fortune’s wheel turns, Cromwell’s enemies are gathering in the shadows.

The inevitable question remains: how long can anyone survive under Henry’s cruel and capricious gaze?

Eagerly awaited and years in the making, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light will trace the final four years of Cromwell’s life, completing his journey from self-made man to the most feared, influential figure of his time. Cromwell is as complex as he is unforgettable: a politician and a fixer, a diplomat and a father, a man who both defied and defined his age.